Movies

DVD of the Week: Another Year

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Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake) has brought us another brilliant observation of the human condition, and asks why some people find contentment and others just cannot.  The film observes a year in the life of a happily married couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen).  They generously host their friends and family; the couple (and we the audience)  pick up insights about the visitors – variously scarred by unhappy circumstance, cluelessness and self-destructiveness.

Mike Leigh may be the cinema’s best director of actors, and Another Year is filled with excellent performances, especially Broadbent and Sheen, David Bradley and Peter Wight. The wonderful Imelda Staunton drops in with a searing cameo at the beginning of the film.  But Lesley Manville has the flashiest role – and gives the most remarkable performance – as a woman whose long trail of bad choices hasn’t left her with many options for a happy life.

Another Year is one of Leigh’s best, and on my list of Best Movies of 2010.

The Trip: duelling Michael Caines

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Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon take a foodie road trip through the north of England.  Brydon is a compulsive impressionist, and he speaks more often in the voices of Woody Allen, Al Pacino, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton, et al than in his own.  That’s entertaining, but when Coogan provokes a duel with their Michael Caine and Sean Connery impressions, it gets even more funny.

Along the way, they dine at some pretty tasty looking restaurants, but always with an edge:  “It has the consistency of snot, but it tastes great”.  There is definitely some food porn, but not quite enough to make my list of 10 Food Porn Movies.

DVD of the week: Four Lions: terrorist comedy, anyone?

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This couldn’t have been made in the US, but fortunately the Brits have made the terrorist equivalent of Waiting for Guffman.   A group of homegrown Brits of Pakistani heritage decide to join the jihad and try to organize a terror mission.  Fortunately, the smartest one is both inept and unlucky, and each of the others is dumber than the last.   The cell’s intramural competition reminds me of the hilarious People’s Liberation Front scene in Monty Python’s Life of Python.

Super 8: coming of age story embedded in a sci fi thriller

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Super 8 is a wonderful coming of age story embedded in a sci fi action thriller.  A group of small town kids in the 1970s are making their own horror movie when a spectacular train crash unleashes a space alien threat government disinformation.  The real achievement in this film is the story of the kids – their speech, actions, fears and hopes are written to be utterly authentic.  I can’t think of a movie that does a better job of depicting American 11 to 13-year-olds.

The special effects are top-rate, especially the train wreck and the alien creature.  But the adult characters who propel the sci fi story are shallow and two-dimensional.

Nevertheless, director J.J. Abrams (Lost, Cloverfield) has created a very special coming of age film.  I liked it.

Coming up on TV: Strangers on a Train

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On June 24, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting this 1951 Alfred Hitchcock suspense thriller – one of his very best. A hypothetical discussion about murdering inconvenient people turns out to be not so hypothetical.

Robert Walker plays one of the creepiest villains in movie history.  The tennis match and carousel finale are great set pieces.

Cars 2: an inspired Bond send up

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In Cars 2, Pixar reprises the cast of Cars.  But the champion racer Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) steps aside so the story can focus on his dimbulb tow truck buddy Mater (Larry the Cable Guy).  The inspired plot sends up the James Bond genre with wonderfully Bondish British spies voiced by Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer.

I am a huge fan of Pixar.  Pixar understands that the best animation in human history is not enough by itself, and also makes the effort to tell great, great stories.  Pixar screenwriting is incredibly superior to that of other animation studios.  Despite that, I wasn’t a big fan of Cars.  In fact, Cars and Ratatouille have been the only Pixar films that haven’t made my Best of the Year lists.

I liked Cars 2 much better than Cars because of the Bond spoof. If you have kids, don’t miss it.

Beginners: smart, sweet and original

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Ewan McGregor’s dad (Christopher Plummer) has just died, shortly after coming out of the closet.  As if this weren’t enough to deal with, McGregor is a depressive anyway, with a rich history of sabotaging his relationships.  But then he meets Melanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds) (and they meet cute).

This is a winning comedy – one of the year’s best movies.  It’s smart, sweet and original.  All of the performances are excellent, especially Plummer’s, which should garner him an Oscar nomination.  All in all, Beginners is a notable achievement by director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker).

 

The Tree of Life: What a bewildering, pompous mess

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Every ten years, Terrence Malick directs a film that critics call a masterpiece (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World).  Here, he has created a bewildering, pompous mess.

The core of The Tree of Life is fine 90-minute family drama about a boy growing up in 1950s Waco (a superb Hunter McCracken) and the friction with his caring but brutishly domineering father (Brad Pitt).  Unfortunately, there is another 60 minutes in the movie.

That additional 60 minutes is a self-important muddle that tries to lift the story to an exploration of life itself – from creation through afterlife.  There are beautiful shots of clouds and waterfalls, with unintelligible whisperings from cast members.  There are Bible verses, the Big Bang and dinosaurs (yes, dinosaurs).   And, in case you don’t get how seriously the movie takes itself, there is an overbearingly pretentious score.

Plus, there is Sean Penn, silently brooding about his childhood from a skyscraper.  And wandering through a desert in his suit.  And reunited with his dead relatives on a tidal flat.

Malick’s pretense succeeds only in distracting the audience from could have been a good story and a beautifully shot film.  Bottom line:  painfully unwatchable.

 

DVD of the Week: Kiss Me Deadly

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Now film noir is by definition dark and cynical, but 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly is downright pissed off and nasty.  Ralph Meeker stars as LA private eye Mike Hammer in this delightfully lowbrow film noir, based on a Mickey Spillane novel.  Much of the fun comes from the menacing nuclear glow of the briefcase that is the film’s MacGuffin.

On his indieWIRE blog, Peter Bogdanovich writes that Robert Aldrich hated Spillane’s pulp so much that he concluded the screenplay with nuclear annihilation.

In the subversive 1984 cult classic Repo Man, the glowing briefcase reappears in the truck of a repossessed sedan.

The Criterion Collection has just released its DVD of Kiss Me Deadly.